Colorado River states meet to discuss drought

Tuesday, May 18, 2004 | 9:39 a.m.

Representatives from seven Western states and the Interior Department met behind closed doors in Las Vegas on Monday to weigh how the longest drought in modern history has affected the Colorado River.

The Colorado supplies 90 percent of Las Vegas' water and millions more for people from Wyoming to Mexico.

The agencies agreed to form smaller technical working groups to look at the drought and how it could impact the water users, Pat Mulroy, Southern Nevada Water Authority general manager, said.

"We're coming at it from the right way," she said. "We're going to look at it from the worst-case scenario, the worst-case weather and worst-case runoff."

The three states on the lower basin -- California, Arizona and Nevada -- have already seen reductions in how much they can take from the river. If the levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead continue to drop, the states could see a cut in the basic annual allocations, which for Nevada is 300,000 acre-feet a year.

An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons, or typically what a family of five uses in a year.

Assistant Interior Secretary Bennett Raley, the White House's point man on water issues, who attended the meeting, said the technical side of the issue is clouded by uncertainty.

"There were discussions on the modeling assumptions and what the (river water) runs might show as everyone tries to understand what the future may or may not hold," Raley said.

But the models cannot tell the policy makers what will happen, he noted.

"Absolutely none of them can tell policy makers if the drought will continue on its current trend or not," Raley said. "We don't know if this is the fifth year of a five-year drought or the fifth year of a 15-year drought."

He said flexibility in responding to the crisis will be important.

Raley and Mulroy said potentially thorny discussions are continuing on a proposed short-term solution to some of the threats posed by the declining water levels.

Mulroy has backed a proposal that would allow agricultural water users who use massive amounts of water for irrigation to temporarily transfer their water rights to urban users or others. The agricultural land would go fallow during the year in which the water is transferred.

The agricultural water also could be used to keep power production at the massive Hoover Dam generators from dropping, she said.

The generators produce more than 2,000 megawatts, enough power for perhaps 2 million people.

Raley said the prospects for converting agricultural water use to other purposes are on the table.

"Those concepts were discussed and will be discussed in greater intensity in the coming weeks," Raley said.